A Dress for Shoshone

I have so many projects, both completed and on the go, its hard to choose one to start the whole process off...

This one seems quite a good one though as I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out :-)

So Shoshone's first birthday was coming up and I realised that she didn't have a special dress to wear for her party... The plan was to nip out to a local outlet to find her a nice little outfit, somehow this changed to designing and making her a dress from some left over fabric.

Doesn't sound too bad, except it was Wednesday afternoon and the party was to be on Saturday. Not to mention that I've never drawn up my own pattern before, or made a dress, let alone done button holes (manually) and only started teaching myself to sew late 2009.

But I'd made up my mind. I made a sketch of what I wanted, studied some of her existing dresses and got to work making a toile. The design changed a few times in the making process, but ended up pretty much how I envisioned it in the first place.

Everything went pretty smoothly...

...until I got to the button holes, I almost ruined the dress!

I could do them fine on the practice fabric, but could I do it on the real thing? NO!

Thankfully I figured out what was causing the problem before it was too late. A seam in the dress was causing the presser foot on the sewing machine to move the fabric slightly to the side, causing the stitches to be too close together so I couldn't cut open the button hole... Not sure that makes sense, but don't really know how else to explain it!?!

Anyway...

The finished result, not too bad I think... Well I'm pleased with it anyway :-)

And a rather reluctant model...

Needs a bit of an iron, but you get the idea :-S

The best thing is it was free!! Made from left over dress fabric, an old bed sheet and some scraps from an apron I made my nan :-)